The first five architects to meet with the Academy all gave the kind of polished presentations you might expect. One arrived with two slide projectors, 50
poster boards, and five staffers, “literally and figuratively surrounding the committee with an answer,” as Kociolek puts it. But the final architect to interview,
Renzo Piano, arrived with one associate—his daughter, Lia—and took just ten
minutes to set up. When the committee members entered the room, they were
surprised to see that he had no presentation materials with him. He had used

Piano told them that he didn’t knowhow he would design their museum.He would need to hear from thembefore he could answer that question.

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the ten minutes to pull a table from the corner and rearrange all the chairs into
a circle around it. Piano told them that he didn’t know how he would design a
new California Academy of Sciences. He would need to hear from them before
he could answer that question. “If you go into a meeting and you already know
everything,” Piano says, “you lose the capacity to understand.”

As the committee members spoke, Piano sketched ideas. He says one of the
most important things he heard that day was another origin story. In 1906
the original museum on Market Street was destroyed in San Francisco’s first
big earthquake, and for a few years the Academy’s research ship, a schooner
that had just returned from the Galápagos Islands, acted as its home base.
“The place that you use for research is the same place you invite people to
come and enjoy and discover,” Piano says with obvious admiration. The message he took from this story was that the Academy wanted to find new ways of
bringing its scientists and the public back together. The other idea that came
through was about building sustainably, he says. “We all thought, This thing
has got to be a kind of experiment, a kind of proof that you can be wise in
making a building.”

After the interviews, Kociolek says, a number of the trustees wanted to hire
the architect who had done the elaborate presentation. But one board member
offered a different view. “She said, ‘Do you want to have a lecture from that
person, or do you want to have a dialogue with Renzo Piano? That person already told us the answer. Renzo Piano is waiting to talk to us about an answer.’”
Her question changed the tenor of the deliberations, he says, and led the board
to choose Piano to design the new museum.

One factor in the background during this decision-making process was the
de Young Museum, just across the road from the Academy. The de Young
had recently unveiled its architectural plans, and a public furor erupted over
Herzog & de Meuron’s bold design, which some San Franciscans considered
an intrusion into the park. Kociolek says that Piano’s collaborative approach
and his experience designing projects within natural settings—like the Beyeler
Museum, near Basel, and the Menil Collection, in Houston—seemed to promise not only a sensitive design but also a peaceful public process.

Which brings us back to the roof. Once he was selected, the first thing Piano
knew was that he wanted the new roof to be the same height as the one he’d
stood on top of: 36 feet. It was an appropriate scale for the park yet tall enough
to offer a view, and it retained a vestigial memory of the old building, a local
landmark. It was only later, when he learned that some program features—the
planetarium and the rain-forest exhibit, for example—would need to be taller,
that Piano developed the rooftop’s signature hills. “The idea was: keep the roof